Technology Collaboration
4/4/2004
6:30 PM
Folks,
I think that a better theme for this thread is not an "alternative" to one kind of research or another. It is rather that the funding for serious research of any kind has dried up.
Following is a recent article about the demise of real research at AT&T, which was once the outstanding example of corporate research anywhere in the world.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1079855793325040.xml
Talent leak drains AT&T think tank
When I was at IBM, management looked to AT&T as a model of good corporate research. But I took the early retirement option from IBM when cutbacks were making it harder for people like me to continue pursuing lines of research they considered promising. I'm now doing the same kinds of things I used to do at IBM, but I have the freedom to pursue my own instincts -- at the expense of having scrounge for my own funding to do so.
What we need is not a cutthroat competition for funding for one kind of project or another, but more funding for all promising approaches.
Following are some excerpts from the article cited above.
John Sowa ________________________________________________
At AT&T Labs, the brain drain is so severe, observed Michael Kearns, now at the University of Pennsylvania, that his former employer's motto should be "404 Not Found" -- the error message that greets many searches on the labs' Web site....
"We had a national gem," said Avi Rubin, who exposed flaws in electronic voting systems last year as a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University. "To see it melt away is very painful," said Andrew Odlyzko, who sensed trouble brewing in 2001 and left to head a digital technology center at the University of Minnesota....
While turmoil at AT&T Labs is a bonanza for places like Columbia University and the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, scientists say it underscores the decline of "blue-sky" research -- science for science's sake -- at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, IBM, General Electric and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center....
The National Science Foundation says federal support for basic science has waned, as well, since 1980. "It's an open question where the next big ideas and discoveries will come from," said Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. A former adviser to AT&T Labs, Saffo warned that corporate America's "relentless race for short-term value is killing our future ... AT&T Labs was a national crown jewel -- and it's been terribly devalued." ...
About 80 percent of research involved projects with an eight- to 10-year window. Now, turnaround targets are 18 to 24 months, said Dickman, the AT&T Labs spokesman....
"We soldiered on as well as we could, quite competently. And we got mugged -- by Wall Street," said Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of [the C++] programming language. Stroustrup left AT&T Labs last year for Texas A&M but retains ties to the labs. He doubts universities can pick up the slack from corporate research labs.
"They don't have the size or the culture or the reward mechanisms or the management experience. Universities don't operate on the scales that Bell Labs and AT&T Labs did" in focused areas, said Stroustrup.... `